The Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  She closed the book. She did not want to leave, but just the thought of reading disturbed her right now. She looked around and saw, at the edge of the garden, a row of stone planters—old ones coated with moss. Beside them stood several plastic pots containing geraniums and orange pansies, waiting to be planted. Red with orange: odd but nice.

  Saga went to the door of the shop. “Excuse me?” The interior now seemed murky and obscure, her eyes were so accustomed to the sun.

  “Yes?” The bird prince appeared from behind a row of shelves, just as he had when she’d come into the shop.

  She pointed back at the flowers. “Do you need these planted? I could do that for you…” The bird prince approached her, smiling, but he looked puzzled. “I have this time to kill,” she said. “I’d like to.”

  He came out into the sun. “That’s jolly kind of you. All right then.” He went back into the shop and emerged with a pair of gritty work gloves, a trowel, and a plastic container. “Bonemeal.”

  “I know about bonemeal from my uncle,” she said. “He says it’s not good outside because it attracts rodents.” Suddenly, she worried that she would sound like a lunatic to this stranger, though his kind expression did not change. “My uncle’s a professor of horticulture at Yale.” The truth was, people always relaxed when she mentioned Yale.

  “Fortunate fellow, to have a knack with plants,” said the bird prince. “I have to choose the easy ones, the ones nobody can kill. So thank you.” He took back the bonemeal. “I tell you what. Why don’t you choose a book when you leave? Any book.” He was about to go in but turned again. “What’s your name?”

  “Emily.” Somehow, with this man, she felt self-conscious about the name she used everywhere else. She knew he would have asked about it—he was that kind of attentive—and she wanted to be alone with the plants and the parrot and the waving trees. He would leave her alone, she figured, only if he thought she was perfectly normal.

  He shook her hand. “I’m Fenno,” he said, and then, of course, hearing his odd name, she wished that she had told him hers. He was the sort of person who (unlike Stan) you wanted to find a connection with, something to keep his interest or earn his respect. Not because it looked like a hard thing to do; in fact, because it looked so easy.

  STAN LET HER GO TO BROOKLYN and visit the puppies. In just a week, they’d grown so much bigger. It was becoming obvious they were part wirehaired something, part something with short legs and maybe something with tall pointed ears. They were white, with brindled spots, their coats (thanks to Stan’s care) clean and shiny as party gowns. Stan fussed with papers at the kitchen table, sighing loudly, while Saga sat and played with the puppies on the floor. “I’m only letting you do this because they need the socialization,” he said when she lay on her back so the puppies could climb across her breasts and lick her face.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

  “Well, what else do you have to do with your stunted life?” he said in a voice that was, for Stan, good-natured.

  When the doorbell rang, he went to the front door. He returned to the kitchen with a girl holding a carrier that contained a yowling cat. “Third and Thirteenth,” she said, handing it to Stan. “I’m double-parked, so I can’t stay long.” She saw Saga on the floor with the puppies. “Hi. I’m Sonya,” she said, the introduction of someone who needed nothing in return.

  Sonya’s hair was dyed black to make her skin look shockingly white. Piano keys, thought Saga.

  She was about to stand up and introduce herself, but Stan was already talking. “I’ll have to keep him out back. I’ve still got this litter in the small room. Can you come back tomorrow, leaflet the block where you found him?” He put the carrier on the kitchen counter and bent to see the cat through the small, prisonlike window. “Hi there,” he said softly. “You are freaked out, I know that, yes I do. Sorry, fella.”

  “Yeah,” said Sonya. “Yeah, sure.”

  “I’ll do the Polaroid and copies,” said Stan. “Go before you get a ticket. Thanks.” He touched her on the back, a friendly touch.

  Sonya gave Saga a circular wave, still no smile. “Next time,” she said.

  In just those few minutes, Saga noticed how much more humanely Stan spoke to Sonya than he did to her—how he expressed real gratitude to Sonya. Sometimes Saga felt, even after all these months since they’d had sex, that she deserved his contempt. Sometimes she looked at him when she thought he wouldn’t notice and asked herself if she could ever be this man’s girlfriend. What would that be like? What would it be like, now, to be anyone’s girlfriend?

  “Okay, I’m closing up,” he said after Sonya left. “So back to the burbs, Story Girl. Want me to call you a car?” Where Stan lived, you couldn’t hail a taxi on the street.

  “I’m fine on the subway,” she said. She helped him carry the puppies upstairs. As soon as she left, Saga knew Stan would attend to the panicky cat on the kitchen counter, make the guy a soft place to sleep and give him some food, maybe cook him something warm and meaty.

  She went back to Manhattan. She had plenty of time to catch the last train home, but the night was mild, and she liked the idea of staying, of sleeping outside in her special place. She got off the L train at the end of the line. She wandered south through the part of the city where meat was sold, where the streets were still cobblestoned. She walked carefully when crossing these streets; not long ago, forgetting herself, she had fallen and skinned both her knees. She followed Hudson Street several blocks south, till she got to the café with the umbrellas, turned west and then south again, down Washington. She liked this part of town best, because only a few of the streets were named for numbers. Most of them had real names, like Charles and Leroy and Jane.

  That first night alone in the city the year before—ashamed and stranded, having fled Stan’s bed and house—Saga had taken the subway to its last stop and wandered, aimless, along this very route. On a corner, in a neighborhood of dark, sleepy buildings, here was a tall iron gate, left open a sliver, that led into a shallow patio in front of a restaurant. At first, Saga went into the patio just to sit and think, to calm down. She found herself secluded from the street by a pair of enormous flowerpots—tree pots, really—that held two tall, thick evergreens. She’d sat there a long time, uncertain what else she could do, till she fell into a doze against the wall. She awoke at dawn when a street sweeper came hissing by a few feet away, scattering dust and broken bits of dead leaves through the patio gate. Alarmed, she stood quickly, but she was alone. She saw her reflection in the plate glass window of the restaurant; through her reflection, a menu. Tagliatelle, pappardelle, perciatelli…If she cupped her face against the glass, she could see a sleek, fancy interior: red velvet benches, coppery modern lamps on the walls, light wood tables.

  She had to pee badly. She let herself out of the gate, closing it behind her, and walked quickly east, where she found a coffee shop open on a corner two blocks away. After tea and a muffin, she called Uncle Marsden collect from a pay phone. She told him she had stayed with that friend, just as she’d said in her message. Oh, a friend from college, someone she’d bumped into on the street. It was the first lie she had told him since she’d moved into his house, perhaps the first real lie she’d ever told her uncle. It surprised her, but she never took it back.

  Some weeks later, she’d decided to go into the city again, this time for no urgent reason. She found herself telling Uncle Marsden that she might stay over, might visit that old friend again. She saw him consciously holding his tongue, respecting her “boundaries.” It was that easy; her age won her freedoms that, after all, she deserved. Didn’t she? She took a sleeping roll she’d found in the top of a closet when she was airing the upstairs rooms. Late that night, after a lot of trial-and-error wandering, she found the spot again.

  That time, the gate had been locked with a heavy chain. But the street was deserted and Saga, driven by a mysteriously stubborn urgency, would not be turned away. She tore the ins
ide of a trouser leg on the top of the iron fence, but she got herself over. Once inside, she felt a moment of animal panic; with the gate locked, she was caged. But after she’d settled in against the planters, this time with her bedding, she felt both secure and free, the dark sky far above the pointed tips of the potted trees. Occasionally, a couple would walk past deep in a conversation they thought private on this quiet street, removed from the commerce and brilliant glow at the heart of the city. Once, a dog sniffed avidly on the other side of the fence; Saga heard an impatient owner yank and scold, yank and scold. That was the closest she came to discovery—or the closest she knew of. She slept in a surprisingly deep state of restfulness. Sometimes when she slept there—not always, but often enough—the moon’s path would intersect with her avenue of sky, and then she would be happy, strangely and unsentimentally happy. It was a kind of happiness so much more felt than reasoned. Had she known this particular feeling before her life had been—as others put it—derailed?

  So she would return to this corner every so often as if it were her home away from home. Each time, very late, she would climb the fence. And then, very early, after watching to make sure the street was empty, she would climb back over. One morning, Saga nearly fell onto a jogger coming around the corner, but he merely swerved into the street, too preoccupied with his exertions to care about where she had come from.

  When it was warm, she might allow herself to stay here two nights in a row. If she chose a Sunday, she could even sleep just a little bit late, because the restaurant was closed on Mondays. Now and then, when she was in the neighborhood putting up flyers for Stan, she’d spy on the restaurant’s life by day. Three café tables filled the little patio where she slept, all occupied on pleasant days by stylish-looking diners. It made her laugh out loud. The thought had crossed her mind, They are eating in my bed! Goldilocks. She was a real-life Goldilocks, but older and far more sly. Sly: that’s what she was on those daring nights.

  In her life with David—a life that, mercifully, she thought less and less about—she had loved to dance. David had belonged to a Morris dancing troop, and she had enjoyed watching him leap about with bells on his knees (though the first few times, she had laughed so hard she cried). But together, they had dressed up and gone to modest charity balls (often for literacy causes, through David’s library job) just so they could dance. They’d even learned how to waltz. She remembered taking the lessons but did not remember how to waltz.

  They had played tennis. Neither played especially well, but they’d had long, graceful rallies every so often. She remembered that, too, the sweet give and take, the crisp hollow smack of the ball. When it was warm, that was what they’d done with their Saturday mornings.

  Now she lived what she thought of as the Life After. This life had its own pleasures, not all of them different, but it was a life as meek as milk, and in the midst of it this was her one defiant thing, sleeping outside in a quite unlikely place where no one would have guessed to find her. Sometimes she even thought of animals asleep in a zoo, in their make-believe jungles and savannahs, meticulously cared for by day but, sleeping at night, wild as could be in their dreams, watched by the silent, all-seeing, all-forgiving moon.

  SIX

  ON MOST DAYS, GREENIE ARRIVED AT WORK between six and seven. George rose early by nature, just like his mother, so he would go with her, taking along his favorite books or toys. They drove down a sluice of narrow curving lanes, between walls draped in blossoming vines, through the center of town and out again, up to the Governor’s Mansion. Greenie thought of it as a ranchion. Built on one level only, a trainlike clustering of vast boxy rooms, it sprawled across a hill overlooking the Rio Grande Valley.

  George loved switching on the battery of lights in the kitchen and later, if there was baking or roasting to be done, helping Greenie set the oven dials. “I’m learning my hundreds!” he liked to proclaim to anyone new he might meet.

  They would play tapes and sing along together—Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had joined Greenie’s repertoire now—but sometimes George would veto the music. Sometimes he had important things to tell his mother while she kneaded dough, chopped vegetables, or mixed a marinade. She had a sous chef and, when she needed them, other assistants, but she still preferred to start her day working alone—or alone with her son, even when it was trying.

  “Diego’s mom says Mr. McCrae made a really big mistake,” he said to Greenie that morning. “They put those fires on purpose, she said. Isn’t that pretty stupid to do?” He sat on a tall stool, spinning around, braking himself with the counter, reversing direction. The stool creaked; Greenie reminded herself to ask Mary Bliss for household oil.

  “Don’t pinch your fingers,” she said. “You know, George, this doesn’t sound like it makes sense, but sometimes you have to light small fires to stop bigger fires from starting. Or spreading.”

  George stopped spinning and looked at her as if she were nuts.

  “It’s like this,” said Greenie as she pulled three bowls from a cupboard. “You’ve seen how there are not just woods here but also fields, big spaces with lots of smaller bushes, right?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there are, and when the bushes and the dry grasses in the fields and the canyons catch on fire, they can spread the fire to the forest, to the bigger trees, much faster. So if you can get rid of the bushes by burning them up first, with the firefighters watching, then you can…you can stop them from spreading fire when no one’s watching.” She was glad this explanation had no adult witnesses. It did not sound logical and probably wasn’t entirely accurate.

  “So why don’t they just chop the bushes down?”

  “Good question. I guess it takes too long to do that. Burning’s faster.”

  “But it didn’t work because it made the fire bigger. So it was a big mistake. Like Diego’s mom said.”

  Greenie smiled at George. “Yes, I suppose she’s right. But don’t tell that to Ray. A lot of people have already told him so—and it wasn’t his decision.”

  “But he’s the boss of Mexico.”

  “New Mexico. He’s the governor, which is kind of like the boss, but he has a lot of helpers who decide things, too.”

  “Well, the helpers are big mistakers too.”

  She thought about trying to explain that the fires were the work of the National Park Service, but she said, “Yes, George, you’re right. And they’re sorry, and they’re trying to fix it.” Conversations with George were often circular, and Greenie found them exhausting, but she envied him his pure, uncluttered logic.

  At seven-thirty, Consuelo arrived to pick up George. Consuelo Chu was a large, grandmotherly woman who was married to Mike Chu, Ray’s head gardener. Consuelo’s three children were in their early twenties, and she liked to say that George was her “practice grandchild.” On weekday mornings, she took him to a playgroup in Tesuque, where the children did more than occupy themselves with blocks and books. They made collages from leaves and colored sand they collected themselves, played soccer, and paddled about in a tall round pool. George’s skin had taken on a pale brown hue that made him look healthier and older than he had in their city life. A dozen boys, all around George’s age, were also driven out from the city, but he had attached himself with fierce monogamous loyalty to Diego, an older boy who hung around because his mother and aunts ran the group. Diego’s father worked at a ranch next door, where sometimes the children were allowed to ride a pony.

  In the afternoons, Consuelo would retrieve George and take him with her on errands, buy him a sweet, and bring him back to the governor’s kitchen for lemonade or milk. On the nights when Greenie had to stay late, to oversee a formal dinner, Consuelo would put George to bed and wait for Greenie to return.

  “Her name is like a sneeze,” George had said the day he met Consuelo, almost as soon as she was out the door. “Oh say oh choo!”

  Greenie had not laughed so hard in months. “Consuelo, honey. It means ‘comfort’ in Spanish.
Lots of people have Spanish names here.”

  “Do I have a Spanish name?”

  “George in Spanish is Jorge,” said Greenie.

  “Hor-hay! Hor-hay! Hor-hay!” chanted George. “Like horses eat hay. That is so weird. Horse-hay. I like ‘George’ better.”

  Sometimes spending an evening or a Saturday with George felt like hanging around with a talk show host while he tried out new jokes—most of which were doomed to be tossed. After hours of his ingenuous quips, Greenie would long for Alan’s company, for the leavening of adult intelligence. But rarely did she give in and call him. She wanted Alan to stew, to miss her, to understand what he had given up—and to see his way to joining them. Most therapists took off the whole month of August; why didn’t he come for August? All right, he’d said, he would come for three weeks—but for part of that time he would take George to see the Grand Canyon. Just George.

  Greenie had not thought about how much she would miss being close to her New York friends, even those with whom she had communed almost exclusively by phone. Speaking on the phone across two time zones and several ecosystems was not the same as speaking on the phone when you could walk out the door into the same stale humid air, with the same ruddy starless sky above your heads, the same sticky frost-warped streets beneath your feet. And the time difference made it tricky. She spoke more now to her single friends—to her surprise, Walter most of all—than she did to her married friends with children.